How often do you use the word "cat"
in your everyday conversations? You'd be amazed! Here are a few examples
of phrases and expressions that have cropped up in the English language.
Now you will learn the meanings, and in some cases, the background of these
words/phrases.

"Cat" in another
language is still a cat!
If your language is not included here, please let me know what the word "cat"
is in your language.

Spanishcatálogo

Frenchchat

Latinfelida(e)

Spanish/Portuguesegato

Portuguese for "tomcat"Padreador

Italiangatto

Yiddishkatalog

Esperantokato

Germankatze

Turkishkedi

Russiankoshka

Chinesemao

Japaneseneko

Russianolena

Swahilipaka

Icelandickottur

Saudi Arabianbiss

Ugandanpaka

Polishkot

Romanianpisca

Swedishkatt

Koreanko-yang-i

Armeniankatu

Hungariancica

HebrewKHaTooL' (male) or KHa'TooLaH' (female)

Cat's cradle

Children play this game with a loop of string wound back
and forth over the fingers of both hands to create a pattern. Once the first
child has created a pattern, the loop is transferred to the hands of a second
child, creating a new pattern. The loop is handed back and forth repeatedly,
making a different pattern each time. The starting pattern is called the
"cradle," and the simplest explanation for this is that the cradlelike
form is just about the right size for a cat. But this interpretation leaves
something to be desired. Why should a cat have been chosen to give the game
its name? Why not some other small animal?

Other explanations:

The first relates to an Eastern European custom. It was
believed that the cat could increase the chances of fertility in a young
married couple. This was presumably based on the observation that cats rarely
have difficulty producing offspring. The cat had a special role in a fertility
ritual performed one month after a wedding had taken place. A cat was secured
in a cradle, and this was then ceremonially carried into the newlyweds'
house, where it was rocked back and forth in their presence. This, it was
claimed, would ensure an early pregnancy for the young bride.

From this ceremony it is easy to see how the idea of a
cat's cradle could have entered the folklore of children's games and then
spread right across Europe and even to the New World, with the original
significance soon forgotten.

Students of ancient Egypt have an entirely different explanation,
however. They point out that similar string games are played by peoples
as far apart as Congo tribesmen and the Eskimos, and that these games have
a magical significance. The string patterns are formed, altered and re-formed
in the belief that these actions will influence the path of the sun. In
the frozen north it is just the opposite -- the Eskimos try to trap the
sun in their strings to shorten its winter absence. The sun in these cases
is envisaged as a "solar cat," to be symbolically ensnared in
the twisting string patterns. If this seems farfetched, it should be remembered
that in the civilization of early Egypt the great sun god Re (or Ra) was
thought to take the form of a cat in his battle with the powers of darkness,
symbolized by a giant serpent. At dawn each day, the valiant sun-cat cut
off the head of the serpent, defeating the night and bringing the light
of another day. This equation between the cat and the sun is thought by
some to have spread across the globe from culture to culture and to provide
the true origin of the magical game of cat's cradle.

Despite its name, it is not the guts of a cat. It comes
instead from the entrails of sheep. Their intestines are cleaned, soaked,
scraped, and then steeped for some time in an alkaline liquid. After this
they are drawn out, bleached, dyed, and twisted into cords. These cords
have great strength and flexibility and have been used for centuries in
the making of stringed musical instruments. In earlier days they were also
employed as bowstrings for archers.

In this case, why should sheepgut be perversely referred
to as catgut? the clue lies in the earliest use of the term. At the beginning
of the seventeenth century, one author wrote of fiddlers "tickling
the dryed gutts of a mewing cat." Later we heard of a man upset "at
every twang of the cat-gut, as if he heard at the moment the wailings of
the helpless animal that had been sacrificed to harmony." These references
come from a period when domestic cats were often victims of persecution
and torture, and the sound of squealing cats was not unfamiliar to human
ears. In addition, there was the noise of the caterwauling at times when
feral tomcats were arguing over females at heat. Together, these characteristic
feline sounds provided the obvious basis for a comparison with the din created
by inexpert musicians scraping at their stringed instruments. In the imaginations
of the tormented listeners, the inappropriate sheepgut become transformed
into the appropriate catgut -- a vivid fiction to replace a dull fact. The
toughest and best catgut comes from the intestines of lean, poorly fed animals.
"Roman strings," the best catgut strings for musical instruments,
are made in Italy. Catgut is also used for hanging clock weights and for
sutures in surgery.

"Clowder" is the correct term for a group of
cats. It is an old word for "clutter," an apt name for a gathering
of cats that has, perhaps, overrun a farm in response to a plague of mice
or rats.

A group of kittens or young cats had a special name: they
were called a "kyndyll," or "kindle," of kittens. This
is based on the old definition of the verb "to kindle," which
described it as "bringing forth" or "giving birth to young."
So a kyndyll of cats was simply a group of felines that had, not so long
ago, been brought into the world.

In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland a large cat is lying
on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear. Alice is told that it is grinning
because it is a Cheshire cat. There is no explanation as to why cats from
that particular English county should be prone to smiling. A clue may come
with the final disappearance of the cat, when it slowly vanishes, starting
with the end of its tail and ending with the broad grin. This grin, we are
told, remains some time after the rest of the animal has gone. It is this
disembodied feline grin that explains the source of Lewis Carroll's image.
There used to be a special kind of cheshire cheese that had a grinning feline
face marked on one end of it. The rest of the cat was omitted by the cheesemaker,
giving the impression that all but the grin had vanished.

Lewis Carroll may well have seen these cheeses and given
him the idea for including a Cheshire cat in Alice. But he may have taken
his reference from an even earlier source. The reason why the Cheshire cheesemakers
saw fit to add a grinning cat to their product was because the expression
"to grin like a Cheshire cat" was already in use for another reason
altogether. It was an abbreviation of the saying "to grin like a Cheshire
Caterling," which was current about five centuries ago. Caterling was
a lethal swordsman in the time of Richard II, a protector of the Royal Forests
who was renowned for his evil grin, a grin that became even broader when
he was dispatching a poacher or some other enemy with his trusty sword.
Caterling soon became shortened to "Cat," and anyone adopting
a particularly wicked, threatening smile was said to be grinning like a
Cheshire cat. Lewis Carroll possibly knew of this phase, but because he
referred to the grin outlasting the rest of the body, it is more likely
that his real influence was the cheese rather than the swordsman.

Whichever is the case, the fact remains that the saying
did not start with Carroll, as most people assume, but was in reality much
older and was merely borrowed and made more famous by him.

As to cats and dogs, we're going to rely a little on another
writer, Christine Ammer, who has produced a marvelous book called, fortuitously,
"It's Raining Cats and Dogs and Other Beastly Expressions" (Paragon,
1988). The first verified use of "raining cats and dogs" was in
1738 by Jonathan Swift (of "Gulliver's Travels" fame), though
there were earlier versions of the phrase.

Why would cats and dogs be a metaphor for a heavy downpour?
According to Ms. Ammer, it may have been because in Northern European myths
the cat stood for rain and the dog for wind. Or perhaps the clamor of a
full-tilt thunderstorm reminded someone of the sound of cats and dogs fighting.

Another explanation: This phase
became popular several centuries ago at a time when the streets of towns
and cities were narrow, filthy, and had poor drainage. Unusually heavy storms
produced torrential flooding that drowned large numbers of the half-starved
cats and dogs that foraged there. After a downpour was over, people would
emerge from their houses to find the corpses of these unfortunate animals,
and the more gullible among them believed that the bodies must have fallen
from the sky -- and that it had literally been raining cats and dogs.

A description of the impact of a severe city storm, written
by Jonathan Swift in 1710, supports this view: "Now from all parts
the swelling kennels flow, and bear their trophies with them as they go
. . . drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, dead cats,
and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood."

Some classicists prefer a more ancient explanation, suggesting
that the phrase is derived from the Greek word for a waterfall: catadupa.
If rain fell in torrents -- like a waterfall -- then the saying "raining
catadupa," could gradually have been converted into "raining cats
and dogs."

There are two theories about "not enough room to swing
a cat," neither of them very cheerful. One is that the phrase refers
to the "cat o'nine tails," a nine-thonged whip used in the days
of square-rigged ships to discipline unruly sailors. This "cat"
got its name from the fact that the welts it left on a sailor's back looked
like enormous cat scratches. Most such whippings took place on the open
deck, both as an example to the rest of the crew and because in the cramped
quarters below decks there was "not enough room to swing a cat."

The other, less cat-friendly theory is that the phrase
refers to literally swinging a cat around by its tail. This version seems
to have quite a bit more evidence in its favor, the phrase having come into
use in the mid-17th century and being used with clear reference to actual
cats ever since, including in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield."

The cat's resilience and toughness led to the idea that
it had more than one life, but the reason for endowing it with nine lives,
rather than any other number, has often puzzled people. The answer is simple
enough. In ancient times nine was considered a particularly lucky number
because it was a "trinity of trinities" and therefore ideally
suited for the "lucky" cat.

Another explanation from 1546, says that cats were regarded
as tenacious of life because of their careful, suspicious nature and because
they are supple animals that can survive long falls, though not from the
top of a skyscraper as some people believe.

"She will have kittens if she finds out about this,"
means that someone will be terribly upset, to the point of hysteria. At
first sight there is no obvious connection between distraught human behavior
and giving birth to kittens. True, a panic-stricken or hysterical woman
who happens to be pregnant might suffer a miscarriage as a result of the
intense emotional distress, suddenly giving birth as a result of panic is
not hard to understand. But why kittens? Why not puppies, or some other
animal image?

In medieval times cats were thought of as the witch's familiars.
If a pregnant woman was suffering agonizing pains, it was believed she was
bewitched and that she had kittens clawing at her inside her womb. Because
witches had control over cats, they could provide magical potions to destroy
the litter, so that the wretched woman would not give birth to kittens.
As late as the seventeenth century, an excuse for obtaining an abortion
was given in court as removing "cats in the belly."

Since any woman believing herself to be bewitched and about
to give birth to a litter of kittens would become hysterical with fear and
disgust, it is easy to see how the phrase "having kittens" has
come to stand for a state of angry panic.

The origin of this phrase, meaning "he gave away a
secret," dates back to the eighteenth century when it referred to a
market-day trick. Piglets were often taken to market in a small sack, or
bag, to be sold. The trickster would put a cat in a bag and pretend that
it was a pig. If the buyer insisted on seeing it, he would be told that
it was too lively to risk opening up the bag, as the animal might escape.
If the cat struggled so much that the trickster let the cat out of the bag,
his secret was exposed. A popular name for the bag itself was a "poke,"
hence the other expression "never buy a pig in a poke."

As the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
defines the term, "in the catbird seat" means "in a position
of ease."

The catbird is a relative of the mockingbird found in the
Southern U.S. and named for its distinctive "mewing" call. Like
most birds, catbirds prefer to stay out of reach of potential predators,
and thus a "catbird seat" is likely to be a safe, lofty perch
above the fray. The phrase arose in the South in the 19th century, although
its first recorded use in print didn't come until 1942.

"In the catbird seat" first caught the public's
eye in a James Thurber short story called "The Catbird Seat."
In the story, a meek accountant is driven to contemplate murdering a fellow
employee who won't stop babbling trite catch phrases, including, you guessed
it, "in the catbird seat." It seems that the babbler is a (then-Brooklyn)
Dodgers fan who has picked up the phrase from the sportscaster Red Barber.
In real life, Barber pleaded guilty to popularizing "in the catbird
seat," and explained that he had picked it up from a man who trounced
him in a poker game years before. "Inasmuch as I had paid for the phrase,"
said Barber, "I began to use it. I popularized it, and Mr. Thurber
took it." And, of course, immortalized it.

It seems that although cats in mythology and folklore are
generally portrayed as wily, clever, resourceful and sophisticated, the
story behind "cat's paw" is an exception to the rule, and not
one that any self-respecting cat would want on his resume. An ancient fable
tells the story of a monkey who came upon some chestnuts roasting in a fire.
Lacking the means to retrieve the tasty chestnuts from the fire, the clever
monkey managed to convince a somewhat dim cat to reach into the flames with
his paw and fetch them. The monkey got his chestnuts, the cat was rewarded
with a nasty hotfoot, and a metaphor for "chump" was born. While
the original "cat's paw" was someone who is tricked into doing
something dangerous or foolish on behalf of someone else, the term has broadened
somewhat over the years. Today's "cats paw" may know very well
what he or she is doing.

Other definitions:

A cat's-paw is light air during a calm that moves as silently
as a cat and causes ripples on the water, indicating a coming storm. The
term is recorded as early as 1769. Captain Frederick Marryat wrote in Jacob
Faithful (1834): "Cat's paws of wind, as they call them, flew across
the water here and there, ruffling its smooth surface."

"Cattycorner" does not actually have anything
to do with cats, although cats are notoriously

fond of sitting in corners and staring at the wall. The
proper word, in fact, is "catercorner" or "catercornered."
The "cater" is an Anglicization of the French "quatre,"
or "four," and "catercornered" originally just meant
"four-cornered." To specify that something is "catercorner
across" from something else is to stress the diagonal axis of an imaginary
box, as opposed to saying "directly across" or just "across."

"Catercorner" first appeared around 1883 in the
South, and originally meant "askew" or "out of line."
The "diagonally across" meaning soon took over, however, as did
the transition from "cater" to "catty." Linguists call
this process "folk etymology" -- people replacing an unfamiliar
element in a word or phrase ("cater") with a familiar one ("catty"
or "kitty"). "Cattycorner" has remained purely an Americanism,
so don't expect folks to understand the word if you use it on your next
trip to London.

Surprisingly enough, suffragettes arrested in England in
about 1913 inspired the first popular use of this expression. The suffragettes
often went on hunger strikes when imprisoned, and the government retaliated
by passing the "Prisoners' Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act,"
which said that prisoners could be set free while fasting but were liable
for rearrest when they recovered from their fasts to serve the remainder
of their sentences. Critics compared the government's action to a big cat
cruelly playing with a little mouse and dubbed the legislation "The
Cat and Mouse Act." From the act, which wasn't particularly successful
came the popularization of "to play cat and mouse with," though
the expression may have been used long before this.

Definition: a burglar who is adept at entering and leaving
the burglarized place without attracting notice, taking on the similarity
of a cat stealthily entering a room without their humans noticing, or suddenly
disappearing when they don't want to do something.

Teddy Roosevelt seems to have either coined or popularized
pussyfoot in about 1905. Meaning crafty, cunning, or moving in a cautious
manner, it refers to the way cats can walk stealthily by drawing in their
claws and walking on the pads of their feet. It's very unlikely that the
redoubtable William Eugene "Pussy-foot" Johnson, a crusading American
do-gooder, has anything to do with the expression. Johnson was nicknamed
"Pussyfoot" because "of his catlike policies in pursuing
lawbreakers" when he served as chief special officer in the Indian
Territory. Later his nickname, in the form of pussyfooters, was applied
to all advocates of Prohibition., While crusading in England, fresh from
his triumph of securing the passing of Prohibition in the U.S., Johnson
was blinded by a stone thrown by a crusading drunk.

Catboat remains a double etymological mystery.No one knows
why the name cat was given in the late 17th century to "a large vessel
formerly used in the English coal trade and capable of carrying some 600
tons." Neither is it known why this name was later transferred to the
small single-masted pleasure sailboat known as a catboat today. Perhaps
the two boats were named independently, the reason for the former's name
anybody's guess, and the cat sailboat so named because it is small and moves
quickly and quietly, like a cat.

Though this word, first recorded in 1659, is inspired by
the nocturnal cry, or "waul," of the cat, catcalls are actually
"human whistles expressing disapproval." A catcall was apparently
first "a squeaking instrument, a kind of whistle used especially in
British music halls to express impatience or disapprobation." It then
came to mean a shrill shrieking whistle people made in imitation of the
instrument and used for the same purposes. In America, however, such shrill
whistles (though in this cast not called catcalls) can be expressions of
approval of a performance.

A caterpillar is a "chatepelos," a "hairy
cat," in French and it is from this word that we originally got our
word for the "wyrm among fruite," as the English once called the
creature. But the meaning and spelling of caterpillar were strengthened
and changed by two old English words. "To Pill" meant "to
strip or plunder," as in "pillage," which came to be associated
with the little worm stripping the bark off trees, and a glutton was a "cater,"
which the creature most certainly is. Thus the caterpillar became a "greedy
pillager" as well as a "hairy cat," both good descriptions
of its mien and manner.

Thin, dangerous ice that would not support the weight of
a (light-footed) cat. Dating back to late 19th-century America, the phrase
has the same figurative meaning as thin ice, as in "You're skating
on cat ice taking a position like that."

cat in the meal

Something hidden or sinister. The expression comes from
a story in the once-popular Webster's "Blue-Backed Speller" a
century ago and is still used today.

Best known today as the title of Tennessee William's famous
play, the expression has been in wide use in America since the turn of the
century. Like "a cat on a hot tin roof" derives from a similar
British phrase, "like a cat on hot bricks," which was first recorded
about 1880 and also means someone ill at ease, uncomfortable, not at home
in a place or situation.

The most valuable counters in poker are the blue chips.
Since the early 1900s Wall Street, borrowing the expression from another
world of gambling, has called secure, relatively high-yielding stocks "blue-chip
stocks." Among the earliest terms for worthless or speculative stocks
is "cats and dogs," first recorded in 1879.

The caboodle in this American expression meaning "the
whole lot," is the same as the word boodle, for "a pile of money,"
deriving from the Dutch boedal, "Property," The whole kit, of
course, means entire outfit. The phrase doesn't read "the whole kit
and boodle" because Americans like alliteration in speech and added
a "k" sound before boodle in the phrase. It has nothing to do
with cats.

To bell the cat is to take on a dangerous mission at great
personal risk for the benefit of others. Cats, of course, have long been
belled to prevent them from killing songbirds. But the expression derives
from a wise mouse. It is from an old fable retold in William "Long
Will" Langland's alliterative poem "The Vision Concerning Piers
Plowman," which was written, as far as is known, between 1360 and 1399.
"Piers Plowman" tells of a family of mice who hold a meeting to
decide what to do about a cat who has been preventing them from foraging
for food. One cunning mouse suggests that a brass bell be hung around the
cat's neck so that they could be warned of its approach. Everyone agrees
that this ploy is perfect, except for one sage mouse, who steps forward
and says, "Excellent idea, but who will bell the cat?"

An automatic recovery in a financial market. Supposedly
unsaleable commodities often find a market after a sharp price fall as buyers
look for bargains. The idea being that even a dead cat will bounce if you
drop it from a great height.

Field workers for the Dictionary of American Regional English
found 21 people who used this expression, meaning "there's something
suspicious, something wrong" -- but not one of them could explain it.
When William Safire asked readers of his nationally syndicated word column
for help, an old man in Louisiana scrawled a letter explaining that the
expression has its roots in fishing for catfish, when trotlines with many
hooks on them are set in the water. The lines are checked every day, so
if a fisherman checks a neighbor's line and there's a dead catfish (cat)
on the line, he knows there's something wrong, something suspicious or fishy
is going on.

Word Watch attributes the phrase "a dead catfish on
a trotline" to usage by the U.S. foreign service going back to at least
1977 and meaning "to back down from a negotiating position."

In the game of faro the "tiger" was the bank
of the house, possibly because the tiger was once used on signs marking
the entrance to Chinese gambling houses. Gamblers called the tiger a kitty,
and it also became the name for the "pot" in poker and other card
games. By the late 19th century sweeten or fatten the kitty had become a
common expression for adding chips to the pot in a poker game or for increasing
the payment in any business deal.

During the Irish rebellion or revolution of 1798, Hessian
mercenaries stationed in Kilkenny amused themselves by tying two cats by
their tails and throwing them over a clothesline to fight to the death.
Just before an officer interrupted their banned "sport" unexpectedly
one day, a quick-thinking trooper reportedly cut off the two tails and let
the cats escape, telling the colonel that the soldiers had nothing to do
with the fight -- the two cats had just devoured each other except for the
tails. The above tale may have inspired the expression to fight like Kilkenny
cats, to fight bitterly until the end. But another story has it that two
Kilkenny cats fought so ferociously in a sandpit that they devoured each
other except for their tails. And still another yarn has a thousand fabled
Kilkenny cats fighting an all-night battle with a thousand cats selected
by "sportsmen" from all over Ireland, the tough Kilkenny Jonathan
Swift, who, more conservatively, prefers the explanation that cats in the
phrase refers to men. It seems that in the 17th century residents of Englishtown
and Irishtown in Kilkenny -- which was bisected by a stream -- were constantly
fighting over boundary lines and were compared to battling cats. But nobody
has offered convincing proof for any of these stories.

To attempt to understand (the true nature of a situation
and the reasons it happened) by reconstructing events chronologically from
present time to the past. This expression first made its appearance in the
New York Times Magazine in 1994, referring primarily to the counterintelligence
officers of the CIA when they were investigating spy activity within the
CIA.

A narrow, often elevated walkway, as on the sides of a
bridge or in the flies above a theater stage. More recently, it has been
adopted by the fashion world to designate the runway where models strut
their stuff.

This refers to skinning cat fish. It is a very time-consuming
and messy job. The expression "There's more than one way to skin a
cat" comes from this also, because everyone has their own way ofskinning
catfish, and are more than willingn to teach it to you. {Thanks to papa9801}

I believe that I can shed some light on one of your cat related
mystery sayings: "Cat got your tongue" refers to the rare neurological
condition, "cataplexy" coming from the Greek word, "katta"
to fall down. Although many persons with this disorder do, indeed, fall down,
given sufficient emotional stimuli -- lauhter, excitement, grief, fear, anger,
(laughter is the most common trigger) -- some persons with cataplexy (many of
whom are also narcoleptics) actually are rendered incapable of speech. For persons
afflicted with this form of cataplexy, the "cat" has indeed got their
tongue!

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

"Fog" Chicago Poems 1916
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

be like a cat on a hot tin roof
to be nervous and unable to keep still What's the matter with her? She's like
a cat on a hot tin roof this morning.

Curiosity killed the cat.
Prov. Being curious can get you into trouble. (Often used to warn someone against
prying into other's affairs.)

look like something the cat brought/dragged
in (informal)
if someone looks like something the cat brought in, they are very untidy and
dirty You can't possibly go to school like that - you look like something the
cat dragged in!

There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Prov. You can always find more than one way to do something. Jill: How will
we fix the sink without a wrench? Jane: There's more than one way to skin a
cat. Our first approach didn't work, but we'll figure out some other way.

like the cat that got the cream
(British & Australian) also like the cat that ate the canary (American)
if someone looks like the cat that got the cream, they annoy other people by
looking very pleased with themselves because of something good that they have
done Of course Mark got a glowing report so he was sitting there grinning like
the cat that got the cream.

When the cat's away, the mice will play.
Prov. When no one in authority is present, the subordinates can do as they please.
When the teacher left for a few minutes, the children nearly wrecked the classroom.
When the cat's away, the mice will play.

put/set the cat among the pigeons
(British & Australian)
to do or say something that causes trouble and makes a lot of people angry or
worried Tell them all they've got to work on Saturday. That should set the cat
among the pigeons.

look like the cat that swallowed the
canary
Fig. to appear as if one had just had a great success. After the meeting John
looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. I knew he must have been a success.
Your presentation must have gone well. You look like the cat that swallowed
the canary.

conceited as a barber's cat
Rur. very conceited; vain. (*Also: as ~.) Ever since he won that award, he's
been as conceited as a barber's cat.

be the cat's whiskers (British & Australian)
to be better than everyone else I thought I was the cat's whiskers in my new
dress.

Cat's Pyjamas

A slang phrase coined by Thomas A. Dorgan. The phrase became popular in the
U.S. in the 1920s,[1] along with the bee's knees, the cat's whiskers (possibly
from the use of these in radio crystal sets). In the 1920s the word cat was
used as a term to describe the unconventional flappers from the jazz era. This
was combined with the word pyjamas (a relatively new fashion in the 1920s) to
form a phrase used to describe something that is the best at what it does, thus
making it highly sought and desirable.http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cat's_pyjamas